


That Time Malcolm Tucker Ran a Food Blog and Glenn Cullen Accidentally Sort of Befriended Him

by capalxii



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Crack, F/M, Happily Ever After, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-09
Updated: 2014-04-09
Packaged: 2018-01-18 17:18:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1436464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capalxii/pseuds/capalxii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Malcolm is a pretty fantastic chef. This is not the only thing Glenn finds out about Malcolm when retirement gets too boring. Jamie x Malcolm by the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Time Malcolm Tucker Ran a Food Blog and Glenn Cullen Accidentally Sort of Befriended Him

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The Peter in this fic is Glenn's son mentioned in the end of series two. I made him an adult living somewhere else. It's not Peter Mannion, although the idea of Glenn and his wife sending sweets home with Peter Mannion is an intriguing one.  
> 2\. On that note, Glenn is also re-married in this fic.  
> 3\. This fic began as a vessel for the notion of Malcolm running a food blog, then became more character-focused, and so the politics plot is very much tertiary and I played fast and loose with it.

Five months into retirement, Glenn found himself thinking, unexpectedly, of work. The thought came to him while he was on his knees in the garden, putting in a few new bricks around the flower bed. They were cold, gray, stony, and he had just dropped one on his thumb, so his thoughts turned to Malcolm.

“Fuck me,” he muttered, as he sat back on his heels.

*

“Do you think he's all right?” Glenn had hesitated bringing it up with his wife; she had been happy when he'd walked away from the job, had been happy to see him out of a career that had drained so much from him. As supportive as she had been when he was still pulling on a tie every morning, she'd been even more supportive when he'd walked through the front door in the middle of the day to tell her he was done. But he had felt the need to mention Malcolm to someone, and she was there and would listen.

“That awful man,” Mary said. “Why do you even care? Didn't he hit you once?”

“He's not that awf—well, all right, yes. But look. Everybody was awful.”

“What he did to that poor nurse, though. Nobody else was that awful, were they.”

Glenn cringed internally. “No, I suppose not. Still.”

Mary sat down at the table with him, putting a plate of something vegetable-y in front of him. “Still what? Put him out of your mind, love.”

“Hm.” He forked a bit of the concoction in front of him and eyed it warily. Glenn had nothing against vegetables, really, except he did think they should be paired with some kind of meat. And as far as he could tell, there had never been a living, breathing animal involved in the making of whatever it was he was about to eat, and he frowned. “What is this?” he asked, hoping he sounded more curious than derisive.

“Trying a new recipe,” she said brightly, and he was happy to know that he'd landed on the right side of the tone line. “You know that food blog I like.”

That food blog that seemed to have come out of nowhere and, according to Mary, literally everyone who knew their way around a kitchen was talking about. Supposedly it was a chef somewhere, most likely London given the markets they mentioned going to, testing reactions to recipes before debuting them in their restaurant, except there had been no debuts and every chef questioned had denied blogging any recipes-in-progress. “I'm still not sure I trust random people on the internet telling me what to eat,” he said, but he opened his mouth and ate it anyway.

It was magnificent. “It's magnificent,” he said.

Mary smiled proudly at him. “Tweaked it a bit. Now you won't be thinking of that awful man anymore, will you?”

Glenn was too busy shoveling food into his mouth to respond.

*

Sadly for Mary, Glenn would later return to thinking of Malcolm. A fellow old bastard who had gone into the system equally idealistic as a young man and gotten spat out equally chewed up and gray—well, worse, possibly, as Glenn wasn't sure that Malcolm had a spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend or minion or even a cat or houseplant.

He did have hedges. Glenn remembered that. He was pretty certain he knew where those hedges were, and a plan started to form in his brain. It wasn't the smartest plan, but Glenn had never learned that most of his decisions were terrible, and he wasn't about to start learning it now.

*

When Glenn showed up on Malcolm's doorstep with lager in hand, it took about two seconds of seeing Malcolm's face to realize it was actually the worst plan he could have come up with. Malcolm stared at him with those eyes that had not actually gotten softer with time, then he stared at the lager, and then a muscle twitched in Malcolm's face and Glenn thought he might unhinge his entire jaw and devour Glenn whole. “You won't turn down free alcohol,” Glenn ventured.

It took two more seconds before Malcolm's face settled into something resembling civility and he shrugged, stepped away from the door, and said over his shoulder as he walked back inside, “Suppose not.”

Holding the six pack to his body like some kind of shield, Glenn entered the dragon's lair and uttered a prayer beneath his breath.

*

The first thing Glenn noticed about Malcolm's house, which he had actually never been in before, was that it looked like a magazine spread. There was nothing about the place that seemed real, or really lived in. There was certainly no cat, though he did spot a small bit of leafy green by the window.

The second thing he noticed was that it smelled. It didn't smell bad. It smelled like food. If Glenn were honest with himself, it smelled delicious, and the combined warmth of the cooking and the spices made Glenn almost forget that he was probably about to be murdered for his good intentions.

Malcolm was already in the kitchen, but he turned to glare disdainfully at Glenn. “You just gonna stand there? Put the lager on the table and sit the fuck down.”

Glenn did as he was told, and promptly got annoyed at how quickly he fell into old habits. “How've you been, Malcolm?”

“Oh, _wonderful_ ," he said. He was doing something in a pan. “You know. Three months in jail with trust fund wankers who got caught embezzling charity funds from children's cancer wards. I'm fucking brilliant, Glenn. The fuck kind of question—what are you doing here? What do you want? You finally stick it in Robyn?”

Glenn balked and almost made to stand. “I'm a married man.”

At that, Malcolm half turned to glare at him. “You? When'd you get married? And why'd they agree to it?”

“I've been married,” he said, knowing he sounded a little petulant. “For some time.” As to why such a sweet, smart woman agreed to marry the bland bloke she'd met at a pottery class, it was a question he asked himself every morning when he woke up and every night before he fell asleep, to no real answer.

“Seriously, I thought you were divorced.”

As did everyone he'd worked with, mostly because they'd never bothered to ask him about his life those last couple of years and he'd never wanted to talk to them about it, but for some reason it was more frustrating that Malcolm somehow didn't psychically know he was no longer a bachelor. “Yes, and then I met someone, and I have been married to her, again, for some time.”

“Mazel fucking tov,” Malcolm muttered as he turned back to the stove. “Still doesn't tell me what you're doing here.”

“I just wanted to—honestly—“ He shrugged haplessly. “I have no idea why I'm here.”

The snort Malcolm made was eloquently demeaning. “Right.” He walked over to the table and pulled a bottle out of the six pack. “At least you brought this. It'll pair nicely. Serendipitous, yeah?”

Glenn blinked in confusion. “Pair nicely with what?”

A minute later, Malcolm had plated the things he'd been making—some kind of thick, seared cauliflower steaks, something else to do with chick peas, something bright and colorful and healthy taking up the rest of the dish—and put it in front of Glenn. “Eat.”

Glenn looked at it askance, then looked at Malcolm with a frown. “I never trust a skinny chef.”

“Eat, or I will cut off your left bollock and hang it on my Christmas tree.”

Trusting that Malcolm was not bluffing, Glenn tucked in.

Glenn was not enough of a gourmand to tell you exactly what ingredients made up a dish from one bite. But his career had taken him through any kind of food experience possible, from the greasiest, most divey takeaway to the finest Michelin rated restaurants around the globe. Glenn did not know the particularities of food, but he knew good food.

This was good food. This was better than good food. This was _fine fucking dining._

“Fucking hell, Malcolm.”

*

It took a few days for him to mention to Mary exactly where he had fucked off to when he'd gone to see Malcolm. He wasn't hiding anything; it's just that she had also recently retired, and neither one of them were quite used to being in each others' hair all day and so she never questioned when he fucked off for a few hours and he never questioned when she did it.

When he finally told her, she stared at him, stunned. “Didn't you once call him--” she grasped for the memories of all the things he'd once called Malcolm--”the thin white Mugabe? I called Peter and he told me he punched you once. And now you're—and now you're—what, you're mates?”

“We're not mates,” he whined. “I just checked in on him, that's all. And anyway, he did apologize for hitting me. That was years ago.”

Mary was not mad. He'd thought maybe she might be, but instead she was looking at him with some sort of soft, shocked sadness. “You checked in on him.”

“...Yes.”

“He's a horrid person. He did horrid things.”

“Yes,” he said with a nod. There was no denying it. But--”We were all horrid people.”

Mary was no idiot, and she knew that. “You never did anything as bad as him,” she said sharply.

Glenn thought back to those last few, worthless, meaningless months in the coalition government, when he'd thought maybe if he did a few horrible things they'd be balanced out by the power they could amass to really help people, and winced. “No,” he said, slowly and carefully, “but that doesn't mean we never did anything bad.”

With a sigh, she crossed her arms and looked down, her face seeming broken for a fleeting second. “I know that. Don't you think I know that? But it was because of him, wasn't it?”

“No—well, yes, but--” He ran a hand over his scalp, an old habit from when he used to have hair to run his fingers through. He liked to pretend he still had hair, sometimes. “It was the whole system, right? Have you noticed a change?”

“No-”

“Right, because there hasn't been one. The whole system is horrible. It makes you do horrible things. It infests you and if you don't have any defenses, if there's nobody around to sort of yank you back from the void, it just takes over, doesn't it? You can start out as pure as you like and end up some absolutely mental worthless little rat. And that doesn't absolve you of anything, but that's what happens, isn't it.”

She pulled back slightly and looked up at him with slightly amused, slightly sad eyes. “You've been waiting years to let that out, haven't you?”

He felt like something had come by and excavated a pile of rotting corpses from his chest. “Yes,” he sighed, pulling her back to him.

Glenn would go see Malcolm again the next Saturday. Before he left, Mary gave him a tin full of her favorite home-made biscuits, her Gran's recipe and all, the ones that she sent with Peter whenever he went back to home after the holidays, and said, “If he's still all skin and bones--” and Glenn nodded and took them with him.

*

Malcolm frowned unreadably at the biscuit and stopped chewing. “Glenn.”

Glenn froze in fear. “Yes?”

“Get me the fucking recipe.”

*

Glenn probably should have put it all together faster. Mary had outright refused to hand off her prized recipe to Malcolm—her sympathy did have its limits—and days later had delighted in telling him about some lovely little blog post where the writer had waxed poetic about secret family recipes and whether or not to resist the temptation to mimic them when the chef in question refused to give them up. She'd recommended he pass the link on to Malcolm, which he had dutifully done, and Malcolm had given him this look.

Perhaps he'd simply thought that Malcolm followed the same semi-anonymous blogs Mary did. Perhaps he hadn't thought anything at all, only going over to Malcolm's for good alcohol, good food, and mostly silence. But it was one day nearing Christmas, when Malcolm had said, “Try this. It's new,” and he had, and it was, and it had been delicious--

\--And not a day later, Mary had said, “Try this, just got it off the blog,” and it had been slightly different but just as delicious--

“Fuck me,” Glenn muttered, and he quickly covered by stating she had simply outdone herself. Which she had, but that wasn't why he was suddenly fuck-me-ing at the kitchen table.

*

“Malcolm why do you run a food blog--”

The door slammed in his face. In retrospect, he thought he probably should have gotten inside before asking that question, but then he remembered that there were knives inside and the Christmas tree did have space for one or two more balls.

*

For Christmas, he left a tin of Mary's biscuits. Malcolm didn't come to the door when he knocked. The blog had gone silent as well, so maybe he'd just gone back to Glasgow or hell or wherever the fuck he hailed from for the holidays.

Glenn shrugged, turned his coat collar up to the cold, and headed for home.

*

It was after the new year, when Glenn casually commented over dinner, “No new recipes?”

“Found a few I wanted to try,” Mary said listlessly. “Nothing particularly interesting, though.”

“Huh,” Glenn said. He didn't mind. Whatever she came up with tended to be fantastic, even if it was just an omelet or oatmeal or a sandwich. But he frowned at the thought of Malcolm not posting anything interesting. “I thought the blog you like, aren't they normally really good?”

“Yeah, but they haven't posted in a while, have they?” she said. “Not even a 'gone for Christmas, see you soon' sort of post. I've been resorting to lesser blogs in the meantime—mind you, half of them are wondering what's happened, too.”

He speared a bit of chicken—an ingredient which had been more infrequent, lately, and he probably wouldn't have even noticed the lack of new recipes except now he realized he'd been half-vegetarian for a few weeks—and mulled that over. “Really,” he murmured.

“Maybe they've just gotten busy,” she said. “Or bored.”

“Maybe.”

*

It was bitter cold when Glenn found himself outside Malcolm's door. “Open up,” he said, knocking loudly. He peered through a window and didn't see anyone. “I'll fuck with your hedges if you don't.”

The door swung open and Malcolm glared at him from the threshold. Glenn realized he hadn't witnessed that glare in so long that he had forgotten how it could make him want to both shit himself and vomit all at once. “What. Are you. Doing here.”

“Nothing,” he said, struggling to glare back while resisting the urge to empty himself on Malcolm's doorstep. “Except my wife really likes your blog, and I'm here because I love her and want her to be happy, and your abandoning that blog is not making her happy.”

“That's fucking sweet of you. You're a good husband. So sweet it might even make up for that perpetually limp micro dick you've been cursed with.”

“Fuck you, Malcolm,” he said. “Pardon me for wanting to make sure you haven't topped yourself over me finding out you're—you're a food blogger.”

Something flickered behind that glare before it intensified. “As if,” Malcolm said slowly as he sauntered deeper inside, “I would ever top myself over Glenn Shitting Cullen.”

Still, he left the door open, so Glenn took it as an invitation to come in. The house was as impeccable as always, but something felt different. If he were mad, he'd say that it felt like the house had grown stubble—no, that was Malcolm, he realized as he glanced over. Malcolm was by the window, snipping at his plants which Glenn had found out some time ago were herbs, because of course Malcolm wouldn't have proper houseplants, of course Malcolm would grow something for the sole purpose of chopping it up into tiny bits later.

He'd never seen Malcolm with stubble before; even when they worked multiple days without break, Malcolm, like most of the men in the office over age twenty five, had always stayed fully shaved in case they'd had to stand near a camera somewhere. He'd only seen him in something other than a suit once, that terrifying fleece thing from the time Malcolm had pretended to be nice prior to tearing off Fleming's head and shitting down his throat.

Malcolm, without the armor of a wonk's bland standard-issue greige suit, looked more vulnerable than Glenn ever remembered. But feral animals who felt vulnerable were incredibly dangerous, and Glenn pushed aside any probing questions he might have had and instead nodded towards the kitchen and asked, “Are you making anything now?”

Malcolm looked at him with guarded eyes and said, “I've been tinkering with this recipe for years. It's Indian-French fusion.”

Whatever the fuck that meant, it was fucking delicious, and afterwards Glenn crowded Malcolm's personal space until he agreed to type up a post immediately on it.

*

By the time he got home with Mary's now-empty tin that Malcolm had ordered him to return (with a note of thanks included that he'd been dying to read), Mary had seen the post and was looking at it suspiciously.

“No, listen,” he said, rubbing her shoulder. “Try it. It sounds interesting.”

She didn't stop looking at things suspiciously for the rest of the evening.

*

Glenn didn't talk to Terri often. He didn't talk to anyone else except Hugh, who was looking for some choice post-politics academic position somewhere and had been for the past two years, and when he did talk to Terri it was mostly just idle gossip about people he hadn't given a fuck about ever. Truth be told, he hadn't given much of a fuck about Terri, but he had come to respect her efforts to force them to fire her. He tried not to think too hard about what that said about him.

So when Terri rang to tell him about the scandal brewing under Dan Miller—a real, proper multi-layered scandal that at first blush was just sexy enough to get coverage that normal people would pay attention to and upon further investigation would get coverage by the higher-minded reporters who only dealt with _important_ news—he knew he had to take it to Malcolm that afternoon. He didn't know why he knew that, or why he had to, but he knew. (And if Terri had mentioned a particularly good recipe he'd tasted two weeks prior, and if she'd said the recipe was rubbish because she'd tried it and it had turned out awful, he kept anything he had to say on that subject to himself.)

Malcolm mulled the news over while he fed Glenn snacks and good scotch. Glenn didn't think anything of the look on Malcolm's face; what were either of them going to do, really, given that neither one of them were in any sort of position to influence anybody. All he could think was that he'd never had completely healthy snacks that were this good, and he asked Malcolm if he could just write the recipe down for him since Mary was pushing him to eat a bit better and these little raw vegan things were such a delight he knew they'd help the cause.

“Sure,” Malcolm said. Glenn thought nothing about the next thing that came out of Malcolm's mouth, either. “Feel free to share it around. Just don't tell anyone who you got them from.”

*

Malcolm's post on the Miller scandal appeared right before the scandal broke in the dead-tree media. Glenn didn't know about it until hours later, when Mary playfully mentioned that her favorite blog had taken a turn for “your favorite subject, Glenn, it's like I can't ever escape that nonsense.”

A new recipe appeared a week later, after Malcolm's one-off anonymous political blog post had gone viral and the statements within it churned up the news cycle for days for a) predicting exactly what would happen, b) predicting exactly why, and c) making an incredibly strong case to oust Dan Miller and replace him with Claire Ballentine, even somehow managing to make the online gambling thing look like a strength rather than a weakness. Everyone was talking about Ballentine now, and if she minded the gambling problem being outed she didn't dare show it as almost all the talk was positive and supportive and a little too much poker paled in comparison to the mud Miller had gotten himself involved in. The arguments were so convincing not even the opposition could say anything about her.

*

The food blogging continued uninterrupted for a nearly month, until Malcolm decided to stir up more shit and make even more people wonder which London chef was privy to the sorts of insider information making its occasional way onto the blog.

Mary kept her mouth shut, but any recipe she pulled off the blog was served with an unholy combination of a knowing smirk and a slightly disturbed frown. By the time Valentine's Day had rolled around, The Rise of Claire Ballentine was firmly the lead story and the story beneath the fold was all about how everybody was now avoiding their favorite restaurants and why was nothing sacred anymore.

The little raw vegan things never made it onto the blog, not that Glenn could see. But other things made it, and sometime around early March, Terri rang again.

*

“Thing is,” Terri said, “I told Marianne Swift about the little raw vegan things about a week back.”

Glenn blinked. “Did she like them?”

“She said she'd had something like it ages ago. Like it was sort of a second generation raw vegan thingy.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. And. And the other thing is, I told her about that blog—the one with all the rubbish recipes?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it's the same blog that's spilling all those secrets,” she continued. “I didn't realize, as I'd been avoiding it. But she turned sort of funny when I told her about this one particularly awful Indian-French fusion dish.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. Said she'd had it years ago, or at least something very much like it. I'm going to ask you something, tell me if it sounds crazy. Is it possible--”

“Terri--”

“--that Malcolm Tucker is running a blog full of truly terrible vegetarian recipes?”

Glenn breathed a sigh of relief. Given how often and how happily he accepted Malcolm's food, he could answer this honestly, at least. “No, it's not possible he's running a blog full of _truly terrible_ vegetarian recipes.”

“Good. I just needed to hear someone say it.”

When Glenn decided he needed to go see Malcolm, he convinced himself it was because it had been a few days and he knew Malcolm would probably need a guinea pig. It was not at all because Marianne Swift was about to break probably the most absurd story of her life.

*

“Fuck me,” Malcolm muttered, collapsing back into his couch.

“It's not that bad,” Glenn said, sitting down next to him. “It's a huge leap to make, and even if people believe it, it's still not bad. So you might be News of the Weird for a cycle.”

“It's not me, you mentally diminished gob of cock-vomit,” Malcolm said. “It's—fucking Claire. If people think I'm involved in her rise up the ranks--”

“Which you are.”

“Fuck off. I'm poison.” He leaned back further and pressed his hands to his face. “It's too soon. If she's linked to me, it's over for her. Fuck me. And you know, maybe I did just want this one thing for—just, fuck me.”

Glenn sat down on the coffee table, and it was a testament to how worried Malcolm actually was that he didn't say anything about that. “Maybe,” he said slowly, “we call someone in.”

Malcolm peeled a few fingers back and peered at him. “Who?”

“Your pet psychopath,” Glenn said. Off Malcolm's confused shrug, he added, “Jamie.”

Malcolm replaced his fingers over his eyes, and Glenn heard a muffled groan. “Automatic no-go.”

“Right,” Glenn said with a frown. “He's in Edinburgh now, isn't he?”

Malcolm dropped his arms to his lap, looking suddenly even more tired than he had been moments ago. “Scotch. Then we figure this out.”

“I feel like that might be the wrong order of events.”

Malcolm was wearing this ridiculous jumper that showed exactly how scrawny he'd gotten, and had moments ago decided to hug an even more ridiculous pink throw pillow to his chest, but his bollocking face was showing and Glenn wondered whether it would be more awkward for him to keep sitting on the coffee table, or get up and walk over to the other side of the room.

“Scotch,” Glenn agreed, “and then we figure this out.”

*

“Have you ever driven people to leave the country?”

Glenn turned his head slowly and peered at Malcolm. “What?”

“Nicola's fucking off to America,” Malcolm said.

“Well that's not because of you,” Glenn said. “She wanted to go two, three years ago.” That seemed to be the wrong thing to say, because Malcolm just glared back at him.

The glare withered into something else and Malcolm went back to staring at nothing in front of him, melting back into the sofa. “Least Jamie stayed a few long hours away. Not that he'd ever--listen. We're not mates, are we?”

Glenn shook his head. They'd moved on to beer and had something pointless, some music reality show, on television. “No. Just a couple of old, washed up gray faced hacks.”

“With a food blog,” Malcolm said.

“No, you've got a food blog, I've got to help my sister redo her bathroom next weekend.” That seemed to be the wrong thing to say as well, and he very nearly asked after Malcolm's own sister, but Malcolm seemed to be heading into some new mental galaxy already, looking up at some point high on the opposite wall, his mouth slack and his eyes distant and dull.

“Since we're not—mates,” Malcolm began, “whatever I tell you is strictly confidential.”

Glenn wasn't sure about the logic, but he said, “Of course,” anyway.

“I wish Jamie had stayed,” Malcolm said. “At least stayed in the same city.”

“Why'd he leave, anyway?”

Malcolm didn't answer that. “What if we try honesty?” he asked tiredly. “I mean it's gonna come out, so we might as well be the ones to let it out, yeah?”

“That's a terrible idea,” Glenn responded.

“No, but listen.” Malcolm sat up, put his beer on the coffee table, and turned to face Glenn, tucking his leg up under him. “If Swift runs with the story, if she can convince people it's not too big a leap, it breaks big. Because it looks like I've been hiding behind the scenes—so the next story is that I've secretly been working for Claire the whole time, all the talking points have been tested and passed by her, we're conjoined fucking twins.”

“Take away the first story,” Glenn said, warming to the idea, “you minimize the chances of the second.”

“Whole thing plays out in the society pages instead of mucking up any real news coverage. Next to the celebrity sightings and wealthy fuckers' charity balls.” He cracked a grin for the first time that night. “And all those talking heads--”

Glenn poked his finger into Malcolm's chest. “Who fucking plagiarized you.”

“Just kept on repeating everything I said without saying where they got it.”

“Because of course, everything you'd said was all so obvious, even some wanker foodie could see it,” Glenn said.

“None of them will say anything. After that, we post recipes ninety percent of the time, deploy policy posts strategically the other ten—keep them on their toes. Yeah? Honesty.”

“That's a brilliant idea,” Glenn responded.

*

Dinner was a simple affair; the photo of dinner, not as much. It's not as though the bottle of scotch had been full to start, but nobody else knew that and it was empty as it sat on the corner of the table. And if the two of them looked a little more bleary than normal, who was to say that was because it had taken them multiple tries between the two of them to get the proper angle and focus for the shot and they were tired of posing.

Nobody, that's who. The post went up with none of the finesse of his normal posts, with a photo off a cell phone rather than his usual DSLR, and just a quick little note about the joys of sharing a meal with a good friend.

*

Glenn's phone began pinging with texts almost as soon as he walked out of Malcolm's door. Approximately seventy percent of them were questioning what blackmail material he had on Malcolm that got him to call Glenn “friend.” Two were from Peter, questioning what blackmail material Malcolm had on him that he was voluntarily spending time at Malcolm's dinner table. They were the only two he cared to answer, but he wasn't quite sure how to answer them.

*

The article did not appear in the society pages. Marianne Swift's name was still on it. But the oddest thing happened: instead of accusing him of secretly working for Ballentine under the safety of anonymity, she questioned whether, and why, it took anonymity for clearer heads to prevail over the constant, self-serving drone of talking heads on television and radio.

It was completely possible, though neither Malcolm nor Glenn would know, that mastering a particularly tricky recipe of Malcolm's had finally impressed Swift's in-laws, and that the assist they'd received had not been purely accidental. And it was more than probable that Malcolm's inviting Marianne over for dinner later that week helped keep that narrative of “heroic voice of clarity rising above the din of preening egos” running longer than it would have otherwise.

*

“Were you ever going to actually tell me and Peter?”

Glenn sighed sheepishly and put the newspaper on the table. “I didn't think Peter would care much, and I'd thought you'd figured it out already.”

“He doesn't, I had,” Mary said with a shrug. “But I wanted you to tell us.”

“I'm sorry.” He took his reading glasses off and rubbed at his eyes. “Old habits.”

“We've never been your career, Glenn.”

“I know.”

“I remember you used to get this way with work. Never us.”

He tried to meet her eyes and failed. “I won't again. Not ever.”

“Agreed,” she said. “So you're not going over to Malcolm's.”

His head shot up as fast as his eyebrows did. “What?”

Mary chuckled at him and patted his arm as she got up to clear her dishes. “Relax. I'm not saying you're banned from seeing him. I'm just saying you two need a chaperon now, at least temporarily. Invite him over. I want to talk shop with him anyway.”

*

Mary happily chatted with Malcolm over whatever she was putting together; Malcolm managed to not only be civil, but also be cheerfully engaged in something. He'd seen Malcolm engaged, of course, but he'd never been particularly cheerful about it.

Glenn didn't care, not really. If he was more content now than he had been in years, it was purely because Glenn had never eaten this well in his life.

In. His. Life.

Later, as he sat reading in the sitting room, he could hear their voices drift in from the kitchen. Mary was asking Malcolm why he'd even started the blog, and Glenn's ears perked up; it was a question that had been nagging him for some time, but he'd never mustered the courage to ask.

“Boredom, maybe—or maybe I just wanted to know I could do something other than break people,” Malcolm said. “It became a little easier once your Glenn started coming by. Cooking for someone with a taste for things beyond chips and cheap chow mein...”

Glenn frowned. Who the fuck else was Malcolm cooking for? Was he cheating on him with some lowlife with poor taste? He started to get up but hesitated; if they noticed him, they'd stop talking, and picking up snippets of conversation was better than picking up nothing at all. Their voices had dropped to a murmur, either aware that there was someone else in the house, or because it was just one of those conversations that ended up quiet and sad.

Even after everything, Glenn couldn't imagine a conversation involving Malcolm being naturally quiet and sad. He made a decision and lumbered silently towards the kitchen.

“...should call him,” Mary said. “How do you know he doesn't want you to?”

“I don't, I guess. Except, after the whole—you know, the inquiry. He sent me a text, and it wasn't. Good.”

Glenn couldn't quite countenance the thought of Malcolm Tucker getting emotional in his kitchen, so he walked somewhat loudly towards the fridge and made to grab a bottle of juice. “Don't mind me,” he said cheerfully. “Be out of your collective hair in a second.”

Except Mary turned to him with concern in her eyes and asked, “Glenn, don't you think Malcolm should call Jamie?”

“Don't see why not,” he said, one half of one second before he realized who the lowlife with poor taste who liked chips and cheap chow mein must be. “Fuck me.”

“Glenn,” Mary chided.

“Sorry. You two had some kind of row, didn't you? I didn't even know. Did anyone know? One day he'd just fu—er, he'd just left, and nobody said anything,” Glenn said.

“Sam knew,” Malcolm said.

Glenn felt the cogs turning in his brain as he tried to recall which Sam; when his memory finally lit upon Malcolm's PA Samantha's face, he asked, “And what does she think you should do now?”

“Haven't spoken to her, have I?”

Glenn stared at him, baffled. “You mean since you got out of jail?” The look on Malcolm's face told him, no, before that.

“Haven't spoken to anybody,” Malcolm said. Glenn listened for anything in the matter-of-fact tone of voice, and heard nothing. “When you showed up I thought I'd dropped into the f—into the Twilight Zone. Felt like some kind of alternate dimension.”

Mary was looking at Glenn with a sort of pleading in her eyes, turned away from Malcolm's view. “How do you think she's going to feel, knowing you've been having me over but not her?” Glenn asked. “What's she gonna think?”

Malcolm's shoulders slumped. “That Glenn Shitting Cullen is more important to me than she is.”

Glenn noticed that Mary didn't curtail that particular swear, but chose to say nothing about it. “You should've had her over at Christmas,” she said instead.

“She would've had things to do.”

“How'd you know that if you didn't ask?” Mary asked.

He looked at her, puzzled. “I just know.”

“It's true, he does have a tendency to just know things,” Glenn said. “Besides, I suppose since you were traveling for the holidays, it wouldn't have worked.”

Malcolm looked at him with that same puzzled face. “I didn't travel.”

Glenn looked back; the puzzlement was catching. “I went round your house, I thought you weren't there. What'd you do for Christmas?”

With a shrug, Malcolm said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, “Nothing.”

“Oh,” Glenn said. He blanked on the horrified look Mary was giving Malcolm, walked out with the full bottle of juice and no glass to pour it in, went upstairs to their room and decided he needed to lie down for a minute.

*

“I sent him home with my biscuit recipe.” Mary curled up next to him. “And I got a promise that he wouldn't leak it.”

“Wouldn't leak—Mary, it's biscuits, you don't leak a biscuit recipe. You might share it, but that's it.”

“Fine. A promise he wouldn't share it,” she said. “Only a single day and I'm starting to be like you two.”

Glenn snorted. She wasn't even close to being as awful as either of them. Then he frowned. “You gave him the recipe?”

“I think he knew it was a pity share,” she said. She propped herself up on one elbow and peered down at him. “You have any idea what happened with this Jamie character?”

“One day he was there, threatening to staple your bollocks to your face, next day he was gone. You'd have to ask Sam, but she won't ever tell.”

“Malcolm seems to think whatever it was, it was his fault.”

“It probably was,” Glenn admitted. But he'd admitted it a little too quickly and amended: “Well. With Jamie, you couldn't assume that, could you.” Off Mary's confused look, Glenn said, “Jamie made Malcolm look pleasant.”

Her eyes went wide; it was apparent that no matter how much this sort of sweet, mostly-post-politics blogger Malcolm had endeared himself to her, she did still recall the horror stories from before. “Oh. Fuck me.”

*

The next time he saw Malcolm—Mary had given him permission to go to Malcolm's house, having gotten some kind of promise from him not to corrupt her husband—he found Malcolm thinking about making a phone call. Just thinking. Not doing.

He muttered, “Shitting Christ,” grabbed the phone, glanced at the contact information that had been pulled up probably for hours, and dialed Sam. “Hi Sam. No, it's not Malcolm, it's Glenn. Malcolm's being a—a—I don't even know, he's being a complete idiot. Here, you can talk to him.”

Glenn wandered into the kitchen and listened to the one-sided conversation. “No, I never called him over—he just showed up! He showed up one day and started eating all my food—I'm sorry, Sam, truly, I just thought—you're absolutely right, I didn't think--”

There were a few leftovers in the fridge of dishes Glenn wasn't sure he'd tried before. He took a bit from each container and hummed to himself as Malcolm apparently agreed to have Sam over for dinner this week.

“Was that so hard?” Glenn said as he waited for his food to warm in the microwave. “Jamie'll be just as happy to hear from you.”

Malcolm gaped at him for a moment, and then slithered off up the stairs. When he didn't come back down, Glenn wandered up after him.

Asleep in his bed, in the middle of the afternoon. It was possibly the most terrible thing Glenn had seen in some time. He quietly made his way back downstairs, picked up the phone, and dialed Sam again.

They weren't mates, at all, and Glenn kept telling himself he didn't care. Glancing one last time up the stairs to make sure Malcolm wasn't coming back down, he said to her, “Tell me everything about why Jamie left. Please.”

*

Sam didn't know as much as Malcolm had implied. “It wasn't politics,” she'd said. “I can tell you that much.”

Glenn could remember some of the more intense, public fights they'd had—but he'd taken Sam at her word because Malcolm and Jamie had always been thick as thieves again not long after the conclusions of those fights. “I'm sorry, I just can't imagine either of them being domesticated enough to have a falling out over the cupboard space.”

“I don't think it was quite that,” she said delicately. Whether it was delicate for Glenn's benefit, or delicate because he'd accidentally crossed some invisible line—he still didn't understand how or why Sam honestly liked Malcolm—Glenn didn't want to know. “Why are you asking, anyway?”

“Well,” Glenn said, “after he got off the phone with you just now, I asked him whether it was so hard to get back in touch, and told him Jamie'd be just as happy to hear from him—he shut up and went to lie down.”

There was an entire universe born and consumed in the pause that followed. When she spoke, it was with a voice thick with emotion. “Is—is he all right?”

He hadn't yelled at Glenn, which was in itself rather terrifying. But he hadn't been exactly the same man Glenn had remembered for months, either. He chose to rally and present a positive front for Sam. “He's Malcolm,” he said. “He'll be fine. Besides, he promised you dinner, right?”

“Yes--” There was a noise like paper shuffling, then a door shutting quietly, and her voice came back close to a whisper. “Glenn, could you stay with him? At least until I get there. I won't be long, I promise.”

He glanced at his watch. It was barely quarter past three. “Of course. Sam—are you okay?”

“I'm fine, just—stay there. Please.”

*

Sam knocked on the door, looked a bit shattered at the fact that she'd had to knock to get in, and then made a beeline straight to Malcolm's room. That was locked as well, but she pulled something out of her purse and started—picking the lock? “Hang on,” he asked, “why'd you knock instead of doing that?”

“Couldn't have the neighbors seeing,” she said.

He didn't bother asking where she'd learned to pick locks. He wasn't sure he wanted to know. As she popped the door open, he realized he also wasn't sure whether this was a bollocking or an intervention, and he wasn't sure he had any right to know one way or another, but he crept in behind her and asked, “Do either of you need anything?”

“Fuck off back home,” Malcolm growled.

“Stay,” Sam said.

It surprised him a little that he was more concerned about disobeying Sam than disobeying Malcolm. With a shrug, he said, “I'll be downstairs.”

About fifteen minutes later, after some raised but indecipherable voices, some eerie silences, and one bout of incredulous laughter, Sam came back down. Glenn looked up from the magazine he was flipping through and asked, “Everything go all right? What got you so worried?”

She shook her head, but it was the kind of head-shake one gives when clearing the cobwebs. “It went fine. I think got him to agree to brokered peace talks.”

Glenn blinked, momentarily confused. “With Jamie?”

“Yes. We just need to figure out how to get Jamie here.”

Glenn blinked again, and made room for her on the sofa. “Sam, what happened between them?”

“I really don't know,” she admitted quietly. “All I know is that he took time off after Jamie left.”

“He'd taken time off for other things,” Glenn said.

She grimaced. “Not real time off. There was always something on his schedule. He liked to think I didn't know.”

“I wouldn't assume that of someone who can pick locks,” he said.

Sam gave him a fleeting smile. “At any rate, we need to get Jamie here. Any ideas?”

For a long moment, Glenn thought. He didn't really want grievous bodily harm committed against him, but that would be a given if they tricked Jamie and he found out. Scratching his face, he said, “Maybe we just ask him?”

Sam looked at him like he'd just told her the moon was made of cheese and he'd eaten it with a side of Pluto. “You mean honesty?”

*

Asking had proved effective, though not until Jamie had had the chance to swear over the phone for so long and with such creativity that Glenn had had time to dig out a notepad and pen and start jotting down the best phrases of the bunch.

“I'm in town next week for a conference,” Jamie had spat out. “Tell that skinny little diseased cunt I want real food, with meat, not that rabbit feed the Oracle of Del-fuck tries to pass off as nutrition.”

Glenn passed that on to Malcolm, who promptly balked, sneered, and retorted, “I'll not take fucking orders from him in my own house. He eats what I make.”

The peace talks were starting wonderfully, Glenn thought. “How about you make dinner, I'll pick something up for him.”

“No,” Malcolm said. He sighed and deflated as he sank into an armchair. “He'll just complain he's being singled out. I'll make something special for him.” He didn't even spit out the word “special.” Glenn finally started to grow alarmed.

*

With both Sam and Glenn in attendance, the actual dinner was perfectly civil. Glenn had asked if Mary would like to come along—but Mary had pointed out that Malcolm had taken to her and she to him, while Jamie didn't even know her and perhaps that would feel too much like Malcolm's side ganging up on Jamie. Not that there were really any sides, given that Glenn still wasn't sure what had happened and Sam didn't know much more than him, but he understood the perception.

It was only after dinner—an impeccable and unimpeachable prawn dish followed by a dessert so airy-sweet that Glenn thought he might actually float away on a cloud of bliss—that things began to go horridly awry. The uncomfortable silence at the dinner table burst as soon as Sam and Glenn got up assuming that the whole group would move from the dining room to the living room for further negotiations. And so while they found their seats and drank their wine, awkwardly watching something quietly on television, the words from the dining room got progressively louder, angrier, and thickened by accent and by—not tears, Glenn thought. Couldn't be.

It was only when Jamie yelled, “You were fucking ashamed, your precious career was more important, _we_  were just a potential scandal to you,” that they began to actually hear what was being said; Sam surreptitiously lowered the volume of the television, just barely, just so they could keep listening in case they had to intervene.

“I wasn't ashamed,” Malcolm pleaded, his voice pitched loud and rough. “I didn't want anyone to know--”

“Sounds like shame to me,” Jamie said.

“I wanted it for myself. All right? I didn't want anyone else to know—I fucking wanted something that was my own, that wouldn't get, get clawed out of me, replaced with some rancid shit poured in its place like everything else in my worthless life and—I wanted something that was mine. That was just my own.”

There was a very, very long pause after that. Glenn sipped his wine nervously and glanced at Sam, wondering if they should go back. Before they could get up, the television went quiet for a moment and Jamie said, “And what did I want? You didn't even think of that, did you, you selfish prick.”

Glenn's eyes went wide. As did Sam's, he noticed. Jamie hadn't cursed, not really, and his voice was conversational. Wine nearly sloshing onto the immaculate coffee table, Glenn put his glass down on a coaster and stood quickly to wade into the fight.

It only took a second to get back to the dining room, but Malcolm's voice had dropped so quiet that Glenn only heard, “...wore the ring, couldn't make it official, but I wore it,” muttered half under his breath as Glenn and Sam approached. He had one hand leaned up on the back of a chair, the other propped on his hip, and his head hung heavily down to his chest. Jamie, by contrast, was standing stiffly, his wiry body nearly vibrating with angry energy as he glared at Malcolm.

“Don't see it now,” Jamie hissed.

Malcolm's head shot up. “Don't see yours either. Besides, you fucking left three years ago.”

“Oh, aye, and you loved that, didn't you,” Jamie said. “Bet you chucked it down the drain as soon as you could, so it wouldn't compromise your fucking career.”

Malcolm glared at him, speechless, before stomping away. Glenn stared at Sam, who stared at Jamie. Jamie finally seemed to notice them, turned his attention to Glenn and looked like he was about to start threatening him with a glassing—but instead he sighed, ran a hand over his face, and leaned against the sideboard.

“Jamie--” Sam began.

“I'm fine, darling,” he lied. “Thinking this was a mistake, but I'm fine—that selfish, hack fucking cum-rag—“ He sighed again, and put both his hands over his face. “I'll see myself out--”

But Malcolm was back suddenly, having appeared out of nowhere, and he threw something small and glinting at Jamie's chest. It fell to the floor with a hard clinking sound, and Jamie stared at it dumbly before bending to pick it up. “Keep it, then,” Malcolm said, his face as hard and terrifying as Glenn had ever remembered it.

Jamie's face was the opposite of terrifying. Those eyes that had been psychotic and wild in Glenn's memory were now almost cartoonishly huge, cartoonishly sad, and Glenn yearned to go back to his wine, or his house, or to go back in time and not be party to any of this to begin with. “That was quick,” Jamie said weakly, an unasked question dangling off his voice. “You found it quick, I mean.”

“Was in the nightstand,” Malcolm said. The stoniness of his face was beginning to crack, and Glenn dragged his gaze away from the scene. “With that stupid fucking Jolson CD you left. And your cunting toothbrush. And those arse-ugly cufflinks of yours—it wasn't the job, Jamie, I was trying to keep it separate from the job, I'm _sorry_ , I swear I just wanted this one thing that nobody could touch and I fucked it up anyway—"

“I'll not forgive you,” Jamie said, except Glenn thought it sounded more like he was trying to convince himself of that than like he was warning Malcolm. Idly, he wondered if he should even be hearing any of this, and he tugged at Sam's sleeve as though to ask. She took his arm in response and they went back to the living room.

“I don't understand,” he whispered once they were well out of earshot. “Were they—a ring? Two rings? Am I hearing this right? Were they—was there a—like, secretly?”

Sam looked both dismayed and shocked, and when she whispered, “I don't know,” Glenn knew why. She knew everything about Malcolm, or at least more than anyone else on earth knew. Except, apparently, Jamie. “I mean, I don't think so, I would've seen something in some sort of paperwork at some point.”

“I don't know what to do with this information,” he admitted.

“Nothing,” she said. “We say nothing, we do nothing.”

He took a deep breath. “Right. We do nothing.”

Jamie took that moment to appear next to them. “Hey,” he said. Up close, Glenn could see his eyes were red-rimmed and his cheeks were streaky-wet. “I'm staying over. We're going to talk. You two--fuck off.”

Only Jamie, and Glenn supposed also Malcolm, could tell people to fuck off and make it sound like a thank-you.

*

The next evening, Jamie came by Glenn and Mary's with a tin of home-made sweets for him, and the recipes for her.

Somehow, Mary managed to get him to sit down at their kitchen table and spill his side of things, while Glenn puttered nearby. “I only ever wanted a real, normal relationship,” he said over hot chocolate. “Hiding it like that—it was toxic, and it was never what I wanted. I get now why he wanted it that way, but he was so destructive, and so self-destructive, and I couldn't--”

Glenn puttered away after that; by this stage he had learned to live with a kinder, gentler Malcolm, but a Jamie who was neither swearing nor threatening to shove staplers in bodily orifices was not a Jamie he was prepared to handle, no matter how invested he unfortunately was in seeing him and Malcolm work things out.

*

He stayed away from Malcolm's house the whole week that Jamie was in town for his conference. There was no telling what he would walk in on if he hadn't.

He went back only when he was sure Jamie had left to go back home. The door opened, and Jamie, dressed in a shirt that was just a touch too long for him and boxers and nothing else, took one glaring look at him and said, “Fuck off, Glenn, it's a fucking Sunday,” before slamming the door shut in his face.

*

There were some days, mostly on the weekend, Glenn would come over and Jamie would be there, his feet up on the coffee table as he munched on something borne from some body of water somewhere—seafood, Glenn learned, was the only concession Malcolm would make, and not all the time, and if Jamie wanted something else he knew damn well which takeaways were closest, or so Malcolm kept snapping—and the three of them could, sometimes, watch something athletic on television while drinking alcohol that was neither too cheap nor too expensive.

Then there were some days Glenn would come over, and Jamie would not be there, and sometimes Malcolm was fine with that because he did technically still live in Edinburgh, and other times it was clearly after a row and those were actually the weirdest days. Those were the days he'd felt compelled to call Jamie for his side of the story, and at some point Malcolm would take Glenn's phone, walk away with it, yell into it and listen while Jamie yelled back, and then somehow a few minutes later everything would be fine.

One day he came over and there was a car parked in front, boxes crammed into every available space, and he got pressured into carrying a few inside Malcolm's house. Jamie was no longer in Edinburgh, neither officially nor unofficially, and it was broad daylight and there were two loud, angry-happy Scotsmen arguing about redecorating in front of Malcolm's prized hedges so it wasn't as though people could pretend this was something it was not.

Malcolm walked over to him after they'd unloaded Jamie's car and said, “This is hard for me so I'll only say it once, and if you ever repeat it to anybody I will skin you and wear you like a suit to go dancing every Friday night from here on out. Thank you, Glenn.”

“I didn't even fucking do anything,” Glenn said.

Malcolm patted his cheek and walked away.

*

It took a little longer after that, but Malcolm finally did make the society pages. In a beautiful park with the flowers come to life on the trees around them, on bended knee in a well-tailored suit befitting a man in the private sector, Jamie glaring down at him with hearts and murder in his eyes, making it official as public as you like. As he munched his toast, Glenn wondered who Malcolm had contacted to arrange for that photo to be taken, just how much he'd cackled when he'd come up with his engagement troll-job, and whether Jamie had waited until after the ring was on his hand to start swearing over the gooey-ness of the whole scene.

They called Glenn back in to broker the negotiations over the reception dinner menu. And they all lived happily ever after, especially Glenn, because really he had never eaten as well in his entire life before Mary and Malcolm had decided he was their on-call test subject.


End file.
